Hi, As the owner of the mentioned bot, I feel I need to jump in, not because I want to defend any position (I pretty much don't care whether pulsebot sends its messages to #developers or somewhere else), but just to mention some facts.
Pulsebot did its first post to #developers on May 30, 2014, but really only started reporting checkins 4 days later. Before that, check-ins were reported by firebot, and it had been doing that for as long as my irc logs go, which is September of 2010. Now, looking at the history of firebot and pulsebot messages, it seems there's been an increase over time, but it started before pulsebot (it could be related to the limit above which only one line is sent for a push with multiple commits, I haven't looked into more detail). https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRNTVhBVEr3Vu6bFaaeHRvY6BaTwuSYrHAa33fZSZda6XzeSw4Jp1l6kIYyNV4c4yOuPnKhQuH6gmz7/pubhtml?gid=534714054&single=true BTW, you'll see in the stats you linked to that the third place goes to firebot, which hasn't posted much since june 2014. So, practically speaking, not much has changed in the recent past as far as commits are concerned. What *did* change, however, if I didn't screw up my grepping, is the number of total messages on the channel: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRNTVhBVEr3Vu6bFaaeHRvY6BaTwuSYrHAa33fZSZda6XzeSw4Jp1l6kIYyNV4c4yOuPnKhQuH6gmz7/pubhtml?gid=819219011&single=true Consequently, the percentage of messages due to commits is very much larger. So it seems to me the core problem is not as much "there's too much noise" as "people are not posting on #developers anymore". One could think there's correlation, but I think the reality is simply that less people use irc. Mike On Sat, Nov 04, 2017 at 12:44:32PM +0100, Philipp Kewisch wrote: > Hey Folks, > > I'm a big fan of having development discussions in the open, and in the > past #developers has been the prime place to do that. Even if the > benefit may not be apparent vs. having a private discussion or using a > closed channel, I think this is one of many ways to increase interest > within the community. Back when I got started with Mozilla as a > volunteer, I enjoyed reading discussions in #developers because they > allowed me to peek into things that Mozilla developers were working on, > and at times got me interested in the code that was being talked about. > > One thing that has recently "gotten in the way" of this is pulsebot. I > acknowledge the usefulness of getting notifications on checkin, but it > does add a lot of noise to #developers. Questions asked or discussions > quickly fade away when pulsebot sends another dozen messages due to > checkins and merges. How much exactly becomes apparent when you visit > https://mozilla.logbot.info/developers/stats : pulsebot has said more > than twice as much as anyone else. > > Of course you could say, why don't I just ignore pulsebot? The point is > that only few will actually do so. My impression over time is that less > of the questions I have asked are being answered, and my suspicion is > that in part, people qualified to answer will just not see it in > scrollback between all the pulsebot messages. > > Long story short, can we move pulsebot to a separate channel so that > people can opt-in to, and encourage people to discuss their Gecko > development topics in #developers again? > > Philip > > _______________________________________________ > dev-platform mailing list > dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
